Saturday, April 14, 2007

Texas weather is famous for its heat and it storms of death. Typically the storms come first and you go "My god...no more rain and swirling death clouds!" the weather hears you, the rains go away and the killer heat comes. Yay.

Yesterday my wife called me at work to tell me that a band of liquid death was making its way across the metroplex. Rain, hail, frogs, locust the typical stuff. I guessed that I could probably beat the storm and hurried to my car to race home.

The drive home wasn't bad until I got near the house. Curse my metal body I wasn't fast enough. It wasn't as bad as other times. Once I was driving home in a storm and the sky was so dark and aqua blue that it looked like I was driving on the ocean floor. Remember in Price of Egypt when they are walking through the parted Red Sea? Whales and whatnot could be seen swimming in the water walls. Well on that day if I had seen a whale swimming through the aqua blue scariness...I would not have been surprised.

But that was different storm. This one was grey skies with a hint of black. Reports kept breaking in on the radio that tornadoes were spotted in the area. They were knocking over trash cans, harassing old people and being all around unruly. I would need to be careful.

Up to this point in my drive I was traveling at about 120 mph as was most everyone else because if your gonna get sucked up in a giant tornado you don't want to be in your car. Strapping yourself to a pipe in a shed filled with sharp objects is the preferred way....just ask Bill Paxton.

But as the rain and wind picked up, the traffic slowed. I was nearly home so I wasn't too worried and after witnessing some super crazy lightning I hurried into the garage and then into the house.

My wife and the kids were camped out in the closet with flashlights and blankets. I wondered if I should be yanking mattresses off of beds to "shield" us from the debris; we had no metal pipe or sharp objects laying around so I was improvising. Before dismantling the bedroom I took a quick look at the radar and saw this:

Yikes and yikes. But oddly enough, as I was building our mattress fort (complete with draw bridge) the clouds broke, the sun came out and life was back to normal. The liquid death had passed us by...this time...dun dun DUUUUUN.